CRN Storage News

EMC wanted to fill the SaaS hole in its data protection business by acquiring Spanning Cloud Apps in 2014, but it became an under-utilized asset under Dell EMC, according to a Spanning exec and a channel partner.

Cohesity specializes in hyper-converged infrastructure solutions for secondary storage, which makes its platform a tempting partnership for HPE and Cisco. Both IT giants have a stake in Cohesity and participated in the the new funding round.

The appliance, combining HPE's ProLiant DL380 server with SimpliVity's OmniStack software and proprietary hardware card, will be sold alongside HPE's legacy HC 380 system, but the two will eventually be combined.

The company, which specializes in hybrid flash and disk storage, wants to expand the definition of "hybrid" to include the cloud, and may look toward its top investor, a venture capital firm, for a potential link with AWS.

Lenovo, which has seen HPE buy its storage partners SimpliVity and Nimble Storage, signed with DataCore to develop a new software-defined storage appliance. Partners say Lenovo needs a long-term storage strategy to go deeper into the data center.

Lenovo's new ThinkAgile For Microsoft Azure Stack is a convergence appliance designed to give customers the convenience of public cloud with the control of on-premise offerings. Here are five key facts partners need to know.

Bill Lipsin said that NetApp plans to bring offer a unique take on hyper-converged infrastructure, one that will work in conjunction with its FlexPod converged infrastructure to offer its channel partners a host of new services and consulting opportunities.

Excelero's NVMesh 1.1 aims at giving large scale data center operators the storage performance and scalability found in proprietary storage systems like those built by hyperscalers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft.